


Where The Falling Angel Meets The Rising Ape

by Elsinore_and_Inverness



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen, Science of Discworld Timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:40:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27728248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness
Summary: Yes, I've just taken this line extremely literally
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 23





	1. The Bookshop At The End of The World

If Aziraphale and Crowley had dedicated much focused thought to the matter they might have come up with this as a possible outcome. The angel and demon, however, had spent millennia expending much energy in the avoidance of dedicating focused thought to the matter.

Fortunately humans, taking the odds that they wouldn’t be around to see it, had no such qualms.

Aziraphale threaded his plump fingers through the demon’s wavy hair. “But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction ice is also great and would suffice. Robert Frost.”

Crowley, sitting on the carpeted floor was rocking slowly side to side. “It’s too cold outside for angels to fly.”

“That’s definitely not what that line means.”

“Azira it’s something I heard in a pub a thousand years ago.”

“The humans have gone. Gone away in their spaceships.”

“Like birds headed out to the end of the universe,” Crowley said.

“As birds do.”

“Where will we go?”

Aziraphale peered into the gloaming of the depths of the bookshop. “Further up and further in.”

The angel and demon followed a winding path deep into the stacks, climbing over piles of books. As the light shifted from candlelight to buzzing fluorescent tubes to exposed bulbs and back again, the hand clinging to the angel’s sleeve seemed to shift and flicker into scales and claws and briefly the alula and covert feathers of a wing.

Time and space twisted around them at incalculable angles as they crept and climbed and stumbled. Eventually they saw the flash of daylight on glass. They had moved centuries in time and light years in space.

It was a bookshop in a city, possibly, in the curious way of bookshops, it was somehow an extension of Aziraphale’s own shop.

There was an ape at the door, and if Aziraphale was correctly reading the broadsheet paper he was holding, looking to purchase a stock of the latest bestsellers of somewhere called Ankh-Morpork.

“Is this a planet of the apes?” Crowley whispered.

“I’m not sure it is a planet,” Aziraphale said, begrudgingly approaching the door. “I think planets have to be round.”

“I believe the definition of a planet is a large non-nuclear fusing body orbiting a star. Nothing in there about round.”

“Its star is orbiting it,” Aziraphale said as the orangutan pushed the door open. “Still not a planet.”

“Aha!” Crowley said “But all bodies orbiting are technically orbiting each other. The Earth’s sun’s core moves in a circle due to the gravitational influence exerted by the Earth. If there is a star orbiting this world, this world is orbiting a star. Ergo a planet.”

“Ook,” said the Librarian.

“See, he agrees with me.”

The Librarian looked at Aziraphale. “Ook oook.”

Aziraphale wrung his hands nervously. “Oh, it really is a though-provoking question. Especially since the. . . Heaven isn’t what it used to be. I want to say that it is more important to be yourself but yourself is also what you happen to be. In your case that hasn’t stayed the same. Maybe I’m not the right person to be asking, although I’m not saying I have stayed the same either. Crowley, do you have any ad—“

Crowley slid his dark lenses down his nose, revealing yellow reptilian eyes. “Being human is overrated.”

After the Librarian left, carrying massive stacks of books with each arm, Crowley turned to Aziraphale. “So what do you think? Are we staying here?”

“We’ll have to think about it.”


	2. In The Beginning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You either saunter vaguely downwards or live long enough to see yourself take a wrong turning in your own dimension.
> 
> I said I was taking it literally, didn’t I?

In the time before the world was, there were spaces created by creatures that were not yet sure what they were. They were still waiting on the blueprints. Looking around to see what was expected of them and if they were getting it right

Aziraphale did not want to leave the place where they had first arrived at consciousness. They had not been named properly. Not correctly bestowed with a function. Aziraphale was one of the cherubim, but what Aziraphale wanted from the beginning was a repository of knowledge, not in a voracious way, not consume knowledge in a fever of intellectual desire, but rather to _have_ , to pour over slowly in minute detail or to have the option of doing so and feel a frisson of free will in ignoring it. Aziraphale applied no morality to this want. They would later, on occasions when it occurred to them to do so. 

They didn’t know, floating in an empty room, exactly what form this knowledge would take, or why they felt better in a form with four limbs and only one head with two eyes than any of the other options that were available to them. After some time floating, they decided it might be comfortable if the two limbs further from the head bent and rested on something. So Aziraphale sat on a bench that hadn’t been there a moment earlier. Time passed in the unquantified way that it did before anyone thought to divide it up based on the movements of spheres that had not been created yet. Eventually an angel came by. One of the malakhim sent to ask if Aziraphale agreed for their room—the angel used the word ‘cell’—to be used as a place to store records. Aziraphale agreed. The room filled up with blueprints and drafts and diagrams and ideas for holy texts and Aziraphale combed through them. The room changed. Its dimensions had never been definite, but Aziraphale increasingly had the sense that if they went back between the rows of books they could keep going… and going… and end up somewhere else. One day they did. Bypassing the usual method of returning to Earth. 

After that first encounter they never again saw an angel with black and red scales scattered in their skin, eyes like spheres of spun gold with slit pupils that closed up in the light and feet that ended like snakes’ tails.

Crawly had taken up arms along with Hell, both out of self-preservation and because it had made sense at the time.

While falling through the space between, about two thirds of the way through the nine-day plunge, lightheaded in the nothingness, Crawly caught sight of something swinging across time and through higher dimensional space.

The orange shape said “Oook.”

“You’ve met me before but I haven’t met you yet?”

“Ook?”

“Well that’s a relief. Thank you for letting me know.” 

The ape swung out of sight, climbing up through the shelves of the multiverse and the demon was alone again, staring into nothing


End file.
